Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Dinosaur Panel Play 2

Of all the different layouts I tried for the panel I'm designing around, my initial favorite was the "Three Cornerstone" (or as I thought of it, "gap-toothed sidelight") configuration, seen below.

This layout doe a nice job of highlighting the "center" panel (now in the upper left), and the overall composition is nice. I thought it would be fun to put all the dinosaurs all against a blue background and then "frame out" the dinosaurs in the darker blue from the fabric line, but it is still hard to fill those empty spaces. Both the smallest dinosaurs and the stripe with the scientific names of the species came from the striped fabric in the collection (see DPP1), and they do a good, if slightly repetitive job of it. So, I went to my LQS "for Inspiration" and came back with these:

Ostensibly the blue fabric was for my blue background (and I did buy a lot of it), but the others were just too good a match to resist! And they looked so good together. Clearly, I had no choice but to sew them together and make a rainbow...

So I went back to the drawing board; I also did something I'd been loathe to do before: fold the individual dinosaur pictures up so their names were no longer visible below the dinosaur. Folding them out of the way meant working with dinosaurs who were no longer centered (and indeed, in some places it really limited the amount of fabric I had to work with before I cut off Dino feet), but it did mean I could go back to the "center panel and four cornerstones" look with a quilt that seemed more proportional.

And for for all my dreading, it didn't look half bad! Now I had a logical place to *put* my rainbows, and the color variety also made it easier to add in a dino names stripe I'd been admiring earlier. When I added those to the top and bottom it looked like this:

I debated extending the "dino names" stripe to all four sides of the quilt, but playing around a bit, it just seemed too uninspired. I liked the idea of incorporating more dinosaur images - but needed them to pop a little more when I set them against the rainbow. So, my mother came up with this idea:

In short, I "bound" each of the small dinosaur pictures in a "contrasting" color (the same fabric as the sashing), and now I can use a straight stitch to attach them to the quilt in the quilting stage. It's still a form of applique, but I get a border I like, and I don't have to worry about raw edges. Here's a "dry run" of the final quilt top, with the dinosaur pictorials just pinned on.